Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'The New Black' And Secret Names

With host Linda Holmes taking the week off to focus on suffering and nose-blowing, we needed only to ask our beloved producer Jess Gitner into the room with us to complete a full Pop Culture Happy Hour lineup. (In historic Studio 44, Jess is usually sealed in an adjacent room, where she watches us through glass the way one might observe a cage of unruly chimps at the zoo.)

Fortunately, Jess was more than ready for this week's show, which we open with an ecstatic discussion of a new TV series all four of us love with varying degrees of intensity: Orange Is the New Black, a 13-episode dramatic comedy (comedic drama?) which just made its debut on Netflix. Created by Jenji Kohan of Weeds, the show stars Taylor Schilling as an upscale young woman sentenced to 15 months in a minimum-security women's prison for a 10-year-old crime involving drug money. The show captures her fish-out-of-water struggles as a seemingly unlikely inmate (and audience surrogate), but quickly fans out to tell many ancillary stories, most of which we find endlessly compelling. I try to elevate my own commentary beyond a spew of superlatives — seriously, I love this show — and only barely succeed.

Then it's on to a wide-ranging discussion of pseudonyms, inspired by J.K. Rowling's recent acknowledgement that she'd secretly written a recent book, The Cuckoo's Calling, under the name Robert Galbraith. We talk Stephen King, Alan Smithee, Garth Brooks, GWAR, the Brontë Sisters (yeah, yeah, another discussion of GWAR and the Brontë Sisters), Anne Rice, Harlan Ellison and many points in between — and pause to discuss what separates a pseudonym from a character from a disguise.